Paper Abstracts

• AbdouMaliq Simone Security and the Majority? Intersecting Urban Economies in the Global South

Primary attention to cities in the Global South tends to focus on how fast they are changing in terms of spectacular new projects, the remaking of city centers, the pushing out a large numbers of urban residents of all social classes, and the extent to which cities are becoming more alike through these major development projects. Alternately, the focus is placed on the poor, on massive slums, insalubrious environmental and unsettled urban populations. Yet in terms of the resultant narrative of what a city is and how it operates, what is between the superblock and the slum—between the progressive growth of an urban middle class largely identified through its participation in new sites and forms of consumption and mobility and the growing precariousness of the life situations of the urban poor—largely vanishes. This notion of the “in-between” is of course simply a pointer to configurations of people, resources, things and spaces that have no stable definition or mode of appearance. Concretely, this in-between would encompass salaried workers in public and service sectors, traders, artisans, sojourners, petty bourgeois entrepreneurs, industrial labor, racketeers, service workers of various skills, and low level technicians. Thus various professions, work, backgrounds, economic capacities, and livelihoods are entailed. At various historical junctures, this in-between will gravitate and become discernible through various social and political formations, such a class, race, or territorial identity. Specific shared interests and vernaculars of recognition will come to the fore that enable the articulation of particular demands and form an anchorage point or target for the application of particular policies, mobilization, and ideological engagement. But across most Southern cities, the concrescence of political subjectivity and the stabilization of constituencies over time ebbs and flows—never entirely formed or dissipated, but porous and tentative. If that which is in-between then is, at least by default, the “majority” of the city, how does that majority secure itself? If the majority of residents are not living in spaces readily identifiable through the common elements of social class, ethnic identity, occupation, or residential history, how are such subsequently heterogeneous districts made viable over time? Again, elements of stability gained through consistent and discernible forms of identification do exist. For example, residential complexes may be established for low-level public sector workers, for civil servants of a particular ministry, for military personnel, or for workers of a particular industrial complex. Residents of particular ethnic backgrounds and residential histories will at times aggregate in specific neighborhoods. Still, the “insides” of these assemblages are rarely homogenous and they are usually situated in larger contexts of intense heterogeneity and dense proximity to highly diverse compositions of land use, economic activity and residential background. Here, security is a process of extending the ways in which things are implicated in each other. Discrepant places, things, experiences are articulated, circulate through each other, not just as matters of speculation, but as a complex architecture of accumulating and dissipating energies and attentions.

• Adriana Young Shop and Awe: Shopping Malls, the War on Terror, and the Freedom to Shop

In the context of the Global War on Terror, the shopping mall has emerged as a laboratory for consumerist forms of urban citizenship and safer participation in the public sphere. In cities like Baghdad and New York that are nodes of the war, the securitization of shopping malls spatializes global frontlines and fantasies – blending military-grade security infrastructure with luxury lifestyle environs to stage an individualized and depoliticized form of consumer-citizenship. This project examines the mall as a typology of global city that incubates sanitized, consumerist experiences of ‘freedom,’ and probes the public costs of the privatized freedom to shop.

• Asef Bayat  The City Inside Out

Neo-liberal restructuring has engendered significant economic and social changes. The advent of deregulation, diminished role of the state, and the crisis of social contract have meant that a vast number of subaltern groups are now left on their own to survive and better their lives. Consequently, a strong view in the current debates seems to suggest that neoliberal city is a lost city—where capital rules, the affluent enjoy, and the subaltern is entrapped; it is a city of glaring inequality and imbalance, where the ideal of the ‘right to the city’ is all but vanished. While this conclusion enjoys much plausibility, I want to suggest in this presentation that there is more to neoliberal urbanity than elite rule and subaltern’s failure. Because the new realities of these cities tend to engender a new discrete form of politics. I will elaborate on this distinct politics by discussing how a key spatial feature of neoliberal city, what I call the ‘city-inside-out’, is likely to instigate street politics and inform the political street.

• Anke Hagemann From Stadium to Fanzone: The Urban Footprint of a Mega Sports Event

By evoking scenarios of unforeseen risks, new urban mass events, such as the Football World Cup and the European Championship, provide a reason to implement further surveillance and control dispositives within the host cities. This is done in the form of large-scale police, private security and army operations, extensive “anti-hooligan” measures, police barriers and checkpoints in urban spaces, as well as the testing of new surveillance technologies. With the establishment of huge public screening events, security standards and control strategies, along with their distinctive spatial patterns, are being transferred from the stadia – private enclosed spaces – to public urban spaces: The “Fanzone” territories are fenced and temporarily privatized to legitimize measurements such as video surveillance, access control and the exclusion of deviant persons. (This contribution seeks to conceptualize the spatial patterns and urban dimension of security and control strategies in football mega events, relating to field research and mappings during the UEFA Euro 2008 in Zurich.)

• Ayse Onçu Neo-Liberalism, Governmentality and Urban Space

Theorists of globalization – at least the first generation – have elaborated cross-border transactions, flows and networks that involve transcendence of space. Of specific interest to this paper are processes which work in the opposite direction, limiting and preventing movement across social and physical space. Its emphasis is on new modes of urban governmentality based on the ‘license to move’. It starts out with such questions as: What is the modus operandi of the contemporary mobility-regime in mega-cities? What are the social technologies which facilitate it? What kinds of social imaginaries sustain it? It highlights how perceived threats of crime, immigration, terrorism – often mediated through indicators of poverty – are territorialized in urban space and regulated through discursive practices of public security which effectively distinguish those who are licensed to move from those who are not.

• Derek Gregory “Baghdad Burning? Urban Violence and New Wars”

This lecture explores the ways in which different visions of ‘new war’ haunt the early twentieth-century, the rhetorical and ethical distinctions they install, and their violent intersection in late modern cities. Particular attention will be paid to processes of pacification and securitization, and to the emergence of Baghdad as a liberal model for the biopolitics of both counterinsurgency and the counter-city.

• Hiba Bou Akar The “Making of” Sahra Choueifat and the Spatial Construction of the Religious Other

Sahra Choueifat has recently become a “religiously” contested area after having developed from an agriculture zone owned by Druze and Christian landowners to a low-income residential area inhabited mostly by low-income war-displaced Shiites. Sahra Choueifat is seen nowadays as the extension of Al-Dahiya (“Hezbollah’s territory”) into the Druze territory, delineated by Hezbollah flags, martyrs’ pictures, and victory arches, and bombed as a “target” during Israel’s July 2006 war on Lebanon. In May 2008, Sahra Choueifat became a frontline battleground between the conflicting parties, mainly Hezbollah and the Progressive Socialist Party, dozens were killed. In this paper, I will trace the development of Sahra Choueifat from an agricultural area and a military zone during the civil war (1975-1990) to a mixed area with industries, urban agriculture, and affordable housing, witnessing ongoing violence along its shifting divide lines. Zoning technologies, planning schemes, building laws, war-displaced compensation packages, housing and land markets have been the tools of the different actors -municipality, political parties, Hariri’s government, landowners, planning agencies, and “residents”- in their territorial war over Sahra Choueifat, which on top of everything else, has turned the area into an environmental catastrophe, witnessing new phases of displacement.

• Maryam Monalisa Gharavi Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Security, Sovereignty and Border Wall Geographies

This paper seeks to explore the concept of ‘security’ (from Latin, sine cura or ‘without care’) as an ontological insecurity in geopolitical borders. Specifically I will consider two cases in which states exercise security by creating im/permeable new artificial geographic borders: the wall in Palestine/Israel and the so-called ‘Gaza wall’ in Rio de Janeiro. The Israeli state designates the wall (built inside the 1967 Occupied Palestinian Territory’s ‘Green Line’) as a ‘security barrier,’ with the idea of ‘securing’ Israel from militant or ‘terrorist’ activity, despite condemnations in the Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice. In Brazil, an ‘eco-barrier’ has been constructed around the Rio de Janeiro favela or slum community known as Dona Marta, with the objective of ‘securing’ the ecological state of nature from the unnatural, predatory invasion of the poor or working-class. In both cases, state actors go to great lengths to deny their legal obligations, whether as Occupying Power vis-à-vis occupied or as democratic nation-state vis-à-vis citizen, a practice I call negative sovereignty. Under negative or negating sovereignty, the state can only be secure when it is ‘without care’ for its obligations as an occupying nation or liberal democracy. Further, in claiming to self-secure and protect against a hostile enemy, artificial walls are built in order to annex more territory for the state. This process of annexation, however, yokes the state toward its feared enemy by failing to recognize the necessary duality in the nature of the nexus. As separation walls divide they simultaneously bind together (nectere), so in annexing territory to clear new geography the state actually binds together with its enemy, a contradiction of its security project. The paper will engage with the work of Schmitt, Heidegger and Virilio as well as key texts in international and human rights law.

• Mona Fawaz A Regulatory Framework for an Architecture of Exclusion: Beirut as Case Study

This paper presents the preliminary findings of an ongoing investigation of the different forms of exceptions through which state actors and agencies organize, manage, and reshape the city’s territories. Taking building permits as the lens through which the analysis of government as practice, notably in the legislation of illegalities (illégalismes), the paper documents three models in which exemptions are applied in Beirut during the process of disbursing building permits: (1) an exceptional tolerance of illegality, allowing permits applicants/urban dwellers not to be legal, (2) a one-time exception granted due to extraordinary circumstances and within restrictive conditions, despite the fact that the permit doesn’t comply to building law, and (3) an exception granted within the texts of the law through provisions that allow for ad-hoc decision making, meaning that exceptions occur within the leeway for ad-hoc decision making allowed by the Law. I argue that the deployment of exceptions by state agencies corresponds to a strategy of managing the city in ways that provide the flexibility that decision makers need in order to organize territories according to their particular interests. These exceptions, I further argue, eventually reshape the city in territories or enclaves, reproducing and strengthening socio-spatial and economic divisions and preserving particular areas as exclusive spaces for capital. It goes without saying that each of these territories or “spaces of exception” is eventually developed as a “threat” to the other, that it develops its own logic of security, and its own dispositions for securing its spaces from the threat of others.

• Mustafa Dikeç Aesthetics of Security

Through an examination of the rise of the so-called ‘securitarian ideology’ in France, my paper offers an interpretation of ideology as an aesthetic affair. I first re-visit the debates surrounding this seemingly old-fashioned notion of ideology to spell out some of the difficulties surrounding it. Despite these difficulties, however, I argue against the abandonment of the notion and point to its significance as a critique of social closure and alleged self-evidence of facts that allow for such closure. Using the case of French banlieues as an example, and building on Jacques Rancière’s notion of ‘sensible evidences’, I argue that this securitarian ideology is not merely a collection of discourses or a system of ideas, but above all the re-configuration of the very space in which these are inscribed, articulated, and made to ‘make sense’.

• Nasser AburahmehThe Bantustan Sublime: Security and Subjectivity in Ramallah

Ramallah has emerged as the de facto capital of a truncated Palestinian proto-state. The centralization of economic, political, cultural and recreational activity, the influx of migrants and diasporic returnees, the rise of new middle classes and a relative social openness all signal the possibility of the nucleus of real urbanity. The rhythms and patterns of everyday urban life are palpable; cultural and sub-cultural life are pronounced and women have achieved a relative degree of social and spatial freedom. Yet Ramallah is a city under siege – encamped and militarily surrounded. It exists in a curious liminality: tethered between indirect colonial occupation and the restless mobilization of local urbanity – neither directly occupied nor free, besieged but somehow vibrant. This ambiguity, in part, reflects a lacuna in Palestinian political space-time, an interstices generated between the emergence of a new political order and the dissolution of past configurations. It is through this space of sharp dissonance and flux that the spatialization of new Palestinian wealth and power in Ramallah is rewriting the coordinates of local politics, generating new class and professional interests and, critically, forging new consumption- and lifestyle-based subjectivities. Ramallah has emerged as a key site in which the very essence of Palestinian subjecthood is being redefined; in which new apparatuses and technologies of ‘de-subjectification-subjectification’ – that include everything from urban housing projects to the renewal of emergency laws – are steadily deployed. One such fundamental modality is securitization and its concomitant discourses of ‘law and order’. It is here that the striated redefinition of subjectivities intersects with the performative embodiment of the ‘hollow state’. While these processes are partial, contested, often incoherent and radically contingent, they, nonetheless, constitute a break in the symbolic order as new practices of signification and representation begin to displace what were shared positionalities and common ‘red lines’, what was assumed and unspoken.

• Nasser YassinSect and the City: Understanding the Socio-Spatial Practices of Young Beirutis

Beirut, which was violently divided and enclaved during the fifteen years of war (1975-1990), continues to be socially and spatially divided. Divisions appears to have become more entrenched since February 2005 with escalating sectarian and political tension. Based on the analysis of 13 focus groups that were conducted between December 2008 and March 2009 with 100 young men and women aged 18-25 from different sectarian backgrounds, the paper aims at understanding the socio-spatial practices of the young Beirutis in the wake of the recent tension. The paper argues that Beirutis make a clear distinction between different types of spaces and places depending on the utilization of these spaces and places and the meaning they depict on them. Those used for leisure, shopping, work and studying allow for social mixing and are seen as banal spaces and places. The paper argues that the Lebanese accept the public-ness of these spaces and places as they carry little “political” or “communal” meaning beyond their mere function for shopping, leisure, studying or work. Spaces and places of residence, however, are necessitated to be sectarian-ally homogenous. The exclusionary nature of these spaces and places has been argued by the youth for security reasons and more importantly for their role in maintaining the identity of each collective. The paper will highlight the status of “co-existence without empathy” in the city of Beirut. The paper will conclude with a number policy recommendations that would help in fostering better inter-sectarian social and spatial relations in Beirut.

• Omar Dewachi Technologies of Security of Displaced Iraqis in Urban Settings of Damascus and Beirut

In 2007 the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated that more than 2 million Iraqis have become externally displaced and have moved to regional countries of Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. The specificity of this displacement was marked by the absence of refugee camps that confined the growing number of Iraqis moving both legally and illegally into these countries. As a result, most of the displaced have slowly moved into various cities’ neighborhoods and urban spaces, or have decide to hide within places which are not under the control of the state. This has created various security concerns for states and international and humanitarian agencies dealing with this large influx of people. In this presentation I explore the various technologies of security, which are at play in managing one of the largest displacements in the region since the Palestinian refugee crisis in 1948. Through tracing the mobility of the displaced within various cities, borders, urban spaces and interventions, I show how the effects of technologies of security are not in the mere policing of bodies and space, but also in making visible such bodies as an object for intervention. In doing so I attempt to explore security as a boipolitical technology, an effect of various forms of state and non-state interventions.

• Paul Amar  Cairo’s Natasha Wars and Harasser Invasions: Human Security Governance, and the Remapping of Gender, Class, and Morality in Neoliberal Egypt

This study examines the gendering of public security politics in contemporary Cairo and the rise of “human security” para-statal rescue industries that have emerged with the collapse of the latest round of speculative urban development. Campaigns focus on three new categories of sexual outlaws: (1) “perverse” populations of homeless boys, (2) “predatory” sexual harassers that cruise depressed shopping boulevards, and (3) “Russian” (actually Kazakh) immigrant women dancers and sex workers. These populations are seen as security threats circulating between downtown Cairo and Giza. And they are portrayed as haunting Cairo’s new peripheral ghost towns – the ring of partially abandoned gated communities and villas that sucked up investment in the 1990s, but are now victims of the bursting speculative real-estate bubble. These ghost towns, and the trafficked sexualities associated with them, are represented as the “perverse” icons of globalization and its effect on landscape, gender, sexual and social norms. I analyze public campaigns to rescue or repress Egyptian citizens associated with these forms of sexualized threat to public security, religious-values security, and the “national security” of the nation’s image. Research reveals how in a time of severe economic and political crisis, the incommensurabilities of new, experimental security doctrines reveal the emergence of new logics that articulate gendered notions of work, citizenship, and public space. I measure the collision and intersection of three governance logics (1) repressive, moralizing humanitarian-rescue logic, (2) a surprisingly resilient juridical personal rights logic, and (3) a revived anti-neoliberal, Nasserist, nationalistic workers’ “rights to the city” logic. How these conflicting logics are contingently joined in the context of security and economic crises leads to surprising outcomes.

• Parvati Nair Fault-Line City: Tangier Dreaming North

This paper will focus on the city of Tangier, in order to examine the complex crossings of spaces and times that mark its location on the peripheries of the West and at the ragged southern edges of Europe. This city rests uneasily on an unstable transnational fault-line between the global ‘north’ and ‘south,’ the prospect of Europe both tantalizingly imminent and separated by an unfathomable stretch of sea. To cross such a shifting border is, for many, to embark on a journey of risk that is at once physical, economic and political. My research will draw upon photographic and video representations of Tangier, as well as on fieldwork that I carried out there. With regard to the latter, I shall call upon interviews that I held with various informants, living in Tangier at the time with the hope of migrating to Spain at some point in the future. I shall argue that Tangier is the intensified locus of an imaginary invention of Europe upon which the growing phenomenon of northward migration from Africa across the Straits is based. The immigrant dream of a materially enhanced future projects onto the geography of Europe, turning it into an imagined paradise of capitalist wellbeing, with Spain as the nearest point of entry. While this dream is one that is widespread in many parts of the developing world, as can be witnessed from the growing millions who annually embark on crossing over from the global ‘south’ to the global ‘north,’ it is lived most acutely in this dream-filled city of abeyance to the north. So too is the prospect of risk most keenly dwelt upon here. Due to its position on the coast, Tangier is the geopolitical site from where the casting of this dream across the Straits into Europe becomes, for many who remain in Africa, most real, most forceful and most daunting.

• Teresa Caldeira Transgressions, Circulations, and Walls: New Configurations of the Public in São Paulo

The public space in any metropolis is always the stage of confrontations that frame the character of everyday interactions and constitute public life. In the conflicting marks that these confrontations produce in the spaces of the city, one can read social processes and find traces of social transformations. In contemporary São Paulo, several practices and urban interventions indicate new modes of production and appropriation of the city and articulate in new ways the profound social inequalities that have always marked it and that seem to acquire new intensities. These practices test the limits of the democratization process as they simultaneously utilize and expand the openness of a democratic public sphere and reproduce transgressive actions ranging from the mildly illicit to the criminal. In this paper, I analyze some of the tensions produced in the city by three different kinds of practices; the proliferation of graffiti, pixações (tagging) and new modes of circulation; the continuing dissemination of walls and technologies of surveillance; and some public policies and interventions of the municipal government. The intertwinement and confrontation of these practices simultaneously challenge established forms of social inequality and spatial segregation and reveal their new forms of articulation and expression. Moreover, they expose the fissures of Brazilian democracy.